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Linguistic Repetition in Three-Party Conversations
Abstract
The conversational mechanism of repetition appears to be strongly connected to the development of common ground among conversation participants. We report on three-party game-based interactions where two players participate in a quiz supervised by a facilitator. We use a semi-automatic method to detect alignment between players by observing linguistic repetitions in the dialogue transcripts and investigate the relation of the alignment to the type of the facilitator’s feedback. Results suggest that the repetitions detected with this method have a function in the interaction, as it is reflected in the verbal and non-verbal behaviours of an interaction facilitator: facilitators provided more encouragement than expected where alignment lacked evidence and less than expected where alignment was ample.
... We think of significant linguistic repetition as an index of mutual understanding. Building on the works of Vogel (2013) and Reverdy et al. (2020), we investigate the relation between linguistic repetitions and mutual gaze. Motivated by the relationship between linguistic repetition and mutual understanding, our assumptions are consistent with the alignment theory developed by Pickering and Garrod (2004;2006;; repetition of linguistic forms provides evidence of a shared situational model, and therefore mutual understanding. ...
... We test imitative alignment by counting the number of repeated and non-repeated items per turn and analyze the interaction with both the occurrence and duration of mutual gaze. This method is a simplification of the approaches of Vogel (2013) and Reverdy et al. (2020) in that we explore a ratio between repeated forms and forms that could have been repeated, without computing whether repetition levels are significantly different from what might have been expected by chance. The null hypothesis is that there is no interaction between presence or duration of mutual gaze and linguistic repetition. ...
... To study these different levels of linguistic alignment (lexical, syntactic, and even phonetic), they detailed the widely used Interactive Alignment Model (IAM) (Pickering and Garrod, 2004). We base our experimental design on the work of Reverdy et al. (Reverdy and Vogel, 2017a;Reverdy and Vogel, 2017b;Reverdy et al., 2020) in which they proved that significant repetitions are witnessed in five levels of linguistic representation: three in-isolation levels: (1) token, (2) part-ofspeech, and (3) lemma; and two paired levels: (1) token + part-of-speech, and (2) lemma + part-of-speech. Using lemmas and not only tokens allows to focus on conventional forms, for more qualitative results (Reverdy and Vogel, 2017b). ...
This paper investigates the correlation between mutual gaze and linguistic repetition, a form of alignment, which we take as evidence of mutual understanding. We focus on a multimodal corpus made of three-party conversations and explore the question of whether mutual gaze events correspond to moments of repetition or non-repetition. Our results, although mainly significant on word unigrams and bigrams, suggest positive correlations between the presence of mutual gaze and the repetitions of tokens, lemmas, or parts-of-speech, but negative correlations when it comes to paired levels of representation (tokens or lemmas associated with their part-of-speech). No compelling correlation is found with duration of mutual gaze. Results are strongest when ignoring punctuation as representations of pauses, intonation, etc. in counting aligned tokens.
... Repetition is a style of writing used in literary or written works to repeat or reiterate a word, phrase, sentence, or other language element for a specific rhetorical or literary effect (Khezrlou, 2019). This repetition language style is used to reinforce messages, emphasize ideas, or create certain literary effects (Ermanto et al., 2020;Reverdy et al., 2020). In addition, it is used to enrich the language, provide rhythm, and create a strong literary effect in the text (Fu et al., 2021). ...
Repetitive language style in romance literary works is not only used to create aesthetic effects, but also creates emotional and intellectual resonance that enriches the reading experience. This study aims to analyze the meaning of repetition language style in the romance Der Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. The research uses descriptive qualitative method with semantic analysis approach. The analysis revealed that anaphora is the most dominant language style used, with the amount of data reaching 40.74%, followed by epistrophe around 31.48%, and polysyndeton 27.78% of data. Meanwhile, the meaning of repetition language style includes strengthening the character's feelings towards the world, providing structure and rhythm to the story, creating nuances and deep emotions. Repetitive language styles in romances can provide new insights into how literary works are constructed and influence readers.
... Annotations related to the facilitator's feedback were originally developed for a study that detected the alignment between players by observing linguistic repetitions in the dialog transcripts and investigating the relation of the alignment to the type of the facilitator's feedback [55]. In that study, the facilitator's feedback was coded by one rater, and annotations were edited for validity and consistency by a second rater, resulting in a set of 2576 feedback annotations. ...
This work explores laughter within a corpus of three-party, task-based dialogs with native and non-native speakers of English, each consisting of two players and a facilitator, in relation to whether the laughter is perceived as serving discourse functions or rather as genuinely mirthful according to a small number of annotators’ (2) inspection of a substantical multimodal dialog corpus (18 interactions of approximately 10 min each). We test the hypothesis that those different types of laughter have occurrence patterns that relate in different ways to the topical structure of the conversations, with discourse laughter showing a stronger tendency to occur at topic termination points. All laughter events (569) are assigned to one of three values, discourse, mirthful or ambiguous, and are studied with respect to their distribution across the dialog topic sections. The analysis explores interactions among laughter type and section type, also with respect to other variables such as the facilitators’ feedback and the speakers’ conversational role and gender. Discourse laughter is more frequent at topic termination points than at topic beginnings, also in comparison to mirthful laughter. Discourse laughter is also highly associated with facilitators’ feedback type, especially at topic ends. Finally, there are few distinctive effects of gender, and an interaction among speaker role and laughter type. The results strengthen the hypothesis of the discourse function of laughter, indicating a systematicity in discourse laughter, in that it is more predictable and highly associated with the dialog topic termination points, and, on the contrary, a less systematic distribution of mirthful laughter, which shows no particular pattern in relation to topic boundaries.
... The observations that we present here are about methods of objectively assessing mutual understanding as emerges in task-based dialogue. Objective independent measures of mutual understanding achieved in dialogue may be used in order to assess linguistic signals of mutual understanding and misunderstanding [2]- [9]. Here we focus on a particular multimodal dialogue corpus, the Human Communication Research Centre (HCRC) Map Task corpus [10]. ...
During conversational interactions such as tutoring, instruction-giving tasks, verbal negotiations, or just talking with friends, interlocutors’ behaviors experience a series of changes due to the characteristics of their counterpart and to the interaction itself. These changes are pervasively present in every social interaction, and most of them occur in the sounds and rhythms of our speech, which is known as acoustic-prosodic accommodation, or simply phonetic accommodation. The consequences, linguistic and social constraints, and underlying cognitive mechanisms of phonetic accommodation have been studied for at least 50 years, due to the importance of the phenomenon to several disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, and sociology. Based on the analysis and synthesis of the existing empirical research literature, in this paper we present a structured and comprehensive review of the qualities, functions, onto- and phylogenetic development, and modalities of phonetic accommodation.
Backchannels are speech contributions produced by a listener in the course of conversation, and are characterized by their short duration and their lack of turn-competitiveness. The current work investigates backchanneling behavior in Ruruuli/Lunyala, a Bantu language. Ruruuli/Lunyala speakers are found to backchannel much more frequently than has been reported for many other languages, with the increase in frequency mostly dependent on backchannels with the continuer function. A wide variety of non-lexical and lexical backchannel forms are used, including the use of repetitions of parts of a previous turn, which appears to be a relatively infrequent use of backchannels crosslinguistically. These forms are combined with different prosodic resources such as fundamental frequency, phonation quality, and duration features, to achieve different communicative functions; for example, the pitch contour arising on repetitions differs depending on the backchanneling function that the particular repetition is carrying out. The resources available for backchanneling in Ruruuli/Lunyala emphasize the rich variability of linguistic and prosodic constructions which are used by listeners to contribute to the smooth progress of conversation. In addition, this study on a Bantu language gives insight into how backchanneling and conversational interaction may show different patterns in different language families and/or cultures.
Repairs –the various ways in which people edit and reformulate conversational turns– are a characteristic feature of natural dialogue. However, relatively little is known about their overall frequency or distribution in conversation. We present a systematic, quantitative study of patterns of repair in two corpora: 'ordinary' dialogues from the British National Corpus (BNC) and task-oriented dialogues from the HCRC Map Task. We use this analysis to evaluate three hypotheses about patterns of repair 1) social 'preferences' 2) processing demands and 3) dialogue co-ordination. The results show that repair is more frequent in task-oriented dialogue, that use of repair is broadly unaffected by familiarity or mode of interaction but substantially affected by task roles. We argue that the complimentary patterns of repair used by conversational partners support the view of repairs as an integrated, cross-turn and cross-person, system for sustaining the mutual-intelligibility of dialogue.
One of the best known claims about human communication is that people’s behaviour and language use converge during conversation. It has been proposed that these patterns can be explained by automatic, cross-person priming. A key test case is structural priming: does exposure to one syntactic structure, in production or comprehension, make reuse of that structure (by the same or another speaker) more likely? It has been claimed that syntactic repetition caused by structural priming is ubiquitous in conversation. However, previous work has not tested for general syntactic repetition effects in ordinary conversation independently of lexical repetition. Here we analyse patterns of syntactic repetition in two large corpora of unscripted everyday conversations. Our results show that when lexical repetition is taken into account there is no general tendency for people to repeat their own syntactic constructions. More importantly, people repeat each other’s syntactic constructions less than would be expected by chance; i.e., people systematically diverge from one another in their use of syntactic constructions. We conclude that in ordinary conversation the structural priming effects described in the literature are overwhelmed by the need to actively engage with our conversational partners and respond productively to
what they say.
As much empirical work attests, people have a reli-able tendency to match their conversational partner's body movements, speech style, and patterns of language use – amongst other things. A specific version of this tendency, Structural priming, which occurs when prior exposure to a particular linguistic structure facilitates one's subsequent processing of the same structure, has gained widespread acceptance. Pickering and Garrod (2004) propose that cross-person structural priming is a basic mechanism of conversational coordination – part of an automatic, resource-free alignment mechanism that is the basis for all successful human interaction. We present evidence to the contrary from two analyses of a corpus of ordinary conversation. The first suggests that the level of structural (syntactic) matching is no dif-ferent from chance, and the second that the observed statistical correlation between prime form and target form may be entirely associated with repetition of lexical form.
Task-solving in dialogue depends on the lin- guistic alignment of the interlocutors, which Pickering & Garrod (2004) have suggested to be based on mechanistic repetition ef- fects. In this paper, we seek confirmation of this hypothesis by looking at repetition in corpora, and whether repetition is cor- related with task success. We show that the relevant repetition tendency is based on slow adaptation rather than short-term prim- ing and demonstrate that lexical and syntac- tic repetition is a reliable predictor of task success given the first five minutes of a task- oriented dialogue.
This paper describes the "strucplot" framework for the visualization of multi-way contingency tables. Strucplot displays include hierarchical conditional plots such as mosaic, association, and sieve plots, and can be combined into more complex, specialized plots for visualizing conditional independence, GLMs, and the results of independence tests. The framework's modular design allows flexible customization of the plots' graphical appearance, including shading, labeling, spacing, and legend, by means of "graphical appearance control" functions. The framework is provided by the R package vcd.
The way dialogue partners collaborate to achieve a joint task is dependent on the way they construct a common ground of knowledge. Diverse conversational mechanisms are involved in developing a common ground, and repetition phenomena appear to be strongly connected to these processes. This article describes the use of an automatic method to detect, within dialogue transcripts, linguistic cues of engagement and synchrony, by observing repetitions at different linguistic levels. We focus on the relationship between repetition patterns and task-based success in interaction with task-based experience and partner familiarity. We conduct our analysis on the data of the HCRC Map Task corpus. Results suggests that, among other patterns, significant amounts of repetitions play a role for unfamiliar participants, with greater success, in particular, at first attempts.
In many contexts from casual everyday conversations to formal discussions, people tend to repeat their interlocutors, and themselves. This phenomenon not only yields random repetitions one might expect from a natural Zipfian distribution of linguistic forms, but also projects underlying discourse mechanisms and rhythms that researchers have suggested establishes conversational involvement and may support communicative progress towards mutual understanding. In this paper, advances in an automated method for assessing interlocutor synchrony in task-based Human-to-Human interactions are reported. The method focuses on dialogue structure, rather than temporal distance,measuring repetition between speakers and their interlocutors last n-turns (n = 1, however far back in the conversation that might have been) rather than utterances during a prior window fixed by duration. The significance of distinct linguistic levels of repetition are assessed by observing contrasts between actual and randomized dialogues, in order to provide a quantifying measure of communicative success. Definite patterns of repetitions where identified, notably in contrasting the role of participants (as information giver or follower). The extent to which those interacted sometime surprisingly with gender, eye-contact and familiarity is the principal contribution of this work.
Written in readable, vivid, non-technical prose, this book, first published in 2007, presents the highly respected scholarly research that forms the foundation for Deborah Tannen's best-selling books about the role of language in human relationships. It provides a clear framework for understanding how ordinary conversation works to create meaning and establish relationships. A significant theoretical and methodological contribution to both linguistic and literary analysis, it uses transcripts of tape-recorded conversation to demonstrate that everyday conversation is made of features that are associated with literary discourse: repetition, dialogue, and details that create imagery. This second edition features a new introduction in which the author shows the relationship between this groundbreaking work and the research that has appeared since its original publication in 1989. In particular, she shows its relevance to the contemporary topic 'intertextuality', and provides a useful summary of research on that topic.
A finite register method of processing dialog transcripts is used to measure interlocutor synchrony. Successive contributions by participants are measured for word n-gram repetitions and temporal overlaps. The Zipfian distribution of words in language use leads to a natural expectation that random re-orderings of dialog contributions will unavoidably exhibit repetition --- one might reasonably expect that the frequency of repetition in actual dialog is in fact best explained as a random effect. Accordingly, significance is assessed with respect to randomized contrast values. The contrasts are obtained from averages over randomized reorderings of dialog contributions with temporal spans of the revised dialogs guided by the original durations. Benchmark distributions for allo-repetition and self-repetition are established from existing dialog transcripts covering a pair of pragmatically different circumstances: ATR English language "lingua franca" discussions, Air-Traffic communications (Flight 1549 over the Hudson River). Repetition in actual dialog exceeds the frequency one might expect from a random process. Perhaps surprisingly from the perspective of using repetition as an index of synchrony, self-repetition significantly exceeds allo-repetition.
This paper describes a corpus of unscripted, task-oriented dialogues which has been designed, digitally recorded, and transcribed to support the study of spontaneous speech on many levels. The corpus uses the Map Task (Brown, Anderson, Yule, and Shillcock, 1983) in which speakers must collaborate verbally to reproduce on one participant's map a route printed on the other's. In all, the corpus includes four conversations from each of 64 young adults and manipulates the following variables: familiarity of speakers, eye contact between speakers, matching between landmarks on the participants’ maps, opportunities for contrastive stress, and phonological characteristics of landmark names. The motivations for the design are set out and basic corpus statistics are presented.
Understanding how to foster knowledge building in online and blended learning environments is a key for computer-supported collaborative learning research. Knowledge building is a deeply constructivist pedagogy and kind of inquiry learning focused on theory building. A strong indicator of engagement in knowledge building activity is the socio-cognitive dynamic of epistemic agency, in which students exercise a higher level of agency for setting forth their ideas and negotiating fit with those of others rather than relying on their teacher. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of (a) levels of participation, (b) facilitatorstyles and (c) metacognitive reflection on knowledge building in two blended, post-secondary education contexts. A study of a total of67 undergraduate students suggest that high levels of participation, a supportive facilitator style, and ample opportunities for metacognitive reflection on the students' own participation strategies are most conducive for fostering epistemic agency for knowledge building. Implications of these results for research and instructional design of online courses are discussed.
On March 27, 1977, 583 people died when KLM and Pan Am 747s collided on a crowded, foggy runway in Tenerife, the Canary Islands. The cause, a miscommunication between the pilot and the air traffic controller. The pilot radioed, "We are now at takeoff," meaning that the plane was lifting off, but the tower controller misunderstood and thought the plane was waiting on the runway. In Fatal Words, Steven Cushing explains how miscommunication has led to dozens of aircraft disasters, and he proposes innovative solutions for preventing them. He examines ambiguities in language when aviation jargon and colloquial English are mixed, when a word is used that has different meanings, and when different words are used that sound alike. To remedy these problems, Cushing proposes a visual communication system and a computerized voice mechanism to help clear up confusing language. Fatal Words is an accessible explanation of some of the most notorious aircraft tragedies of our time, and it will appeal to scholars in communications, linguistics, and cognitive science, to aviation experts, and to general readers.
This paper explores how conversants co-ordinate their use and interpretation of language in a restricted context. It revolves around the analysis of the spatial descriptions which emerge during the course of 56 dialogues, elicited in the laboratory using a specially designed computer maze game.Two types of analysis are reported. The first is a semantic analysis of the various types of description, which indicates how pairs of speakers develop different language schemes associated with different mental models of the maze configuration. The second analysis concerns how the communicants co-ordinate in developing their description schemes.The results from this study would suggest that language processing in dialogue may be governed by local principles of interaction which have received little attention in the psychological and linguistic literature to date.RésuméCet article etude comment les participants a une conversation coordonnent leur utilisation et lent interprétation du langage dans un contexte restreint. Cette etude repose sur l'analyse de descriptions spatiales qui sont apparues au cours de 56 dialogues obtenus en laboratoire en utilisant un jeu de labyrinthe sur ordinateur specialement conçu a cette fin.Nous avons effectué deux types d'analyses. D'abord, une analyse sémantique des differents types de description qui indique comment des couples de locuteurs développent differents schémas linguistiques associés a differents modèles mentaux de la configuration du labyrinthe. Ensuite, une analyse de la manière dont les communicants coordonnent la mise sur pied de leurs descriptions.Les résultats de cette etude nous paraissent suggérer que le traitement du langage au cents d'un dialogue est pent-titre régi par des principes locaux d'interaction qui ont reçu pen d'attention de la part des psychologues et des linguistes jusqu'à aujourd'hui.
There is substantial evidence that speakers co-ordinate their contributions in dialogue. Until now, experimental studies of co-ordination have concentrated on the development of shared strategies for reference. We present an experiment that employed a novel confederate-scripting technique to investigate whether speakers also co-ordinate syntactic structure in dialogue. Pairs of speakers took it in turns to describe pictures to each other. One speaker was a confederate of the experimenter and produced scripted descriptions that systematically varied in syntactic structure. The syntactic structure of the confederate's description affected the syntactic structure of the other speaker's subsequent description. We suggest that these effects are instances of syntactic priming (Bock, 1986), and provide evidence for a shared level of representation in comprehension and production. We describe how these effects might be realized in a processing model of language production, and relate them to previous findings of linguistic co-ordination in dialogue.
This article introduces the idea of moderated group chat (MGC) on the Internet. Building upon existing theory from the research stream on group dynamics, we examine the possible influence of efficacy beliefs on customer’s satisfaction with MGC. Specifically, we focus on the influence of self- and group-efficacy beliefs at multiple levels of analysis. Furthermore, we take into account a relevant aspect of MGC: the style of the facilitator. The findings support the influence of self- and group-efficacy and show that the exact nature of these influences on customer satisfaction varies across facilitator style and group-level processes.
- H Giles
Measuring synchrony in dialog transcripts. Cognitive behavioural systems
- C Vogel
- L Behan
- Carl Vogel
Modeling collaborative multimodal behavior in group dialogues: The MULTISIMO corpus
- M Koutsombogera
- C Vogel
Attribution of mutual understanding
- C Vogel
Teaching Talk: Strategies for Production and Assessment
- G Brown
- A Anderson
- R Shillcock
- G Yule